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Tuesday, 6 December 2011

Open Access and the Pacific

Open access is a growing trend in scholarly publishing, and a particularly important one enabling better access to scholarly work in the developing world. The Savage Minds blog has recently highlighted that some of the most focused journals on anthropology and the Pacific are available open access.

The blog author states: "These journals are small and specialized — despite the size of the Pacific, the scholarly community is pretty small — but despite this they are all being made more and more available online. Or maybe I should say because of this. I also think that we, like the physicists, are a group of people with a strong sense of community and a commitment to the values of our discipline — and the Pacific is a place where people value share and community."

At the University of Hawaii the Center for Pacific Island Studies has done a superb job of making its work available open access. It includes a occasional papers series that began with relatively staid titles like Pacific-Related Audiovisual Materials for Secondary Schools to truly new and exciting scholarship by Pacific Islanders such as Indigenous Encounters: Reflections on Relations Between People in the Pacific edited by Katerina Teaiwa and The Space Between: Negotiating Culture, Place, and Identity in the Pacific by Marata Tamaira.